Chris Goodwin

Re: FH Requests (Long)

Originally posted by PhilFleischmann

First of all, you definitely DON’T need to include what always seems to come at the front of every HERO System book: A list of all the Skills, Perks, Talents, Powers, Advantages, Limitations, and Disadvantages and explain how each one can be used in the genre. We already know that an Area Effect Energy Blast can be used to make a fireball spell, and that Invisibility can be used to make an invisibility spell, and that orcs might have a Social Limitation in a world of humans.

Oh really? How do we know this? We know this because we've got two editions of FH already telling us this, plus scads of experience with the system. What happens when someone picks up FREd and FH3 for the first time and says "Wow, I'd love to run this stuff, but I can't figure out how to build spells? Should I build my Fireball as Area Effect or Explosion?" We've got people already asking this stuff on the boards for Champions;it would be nice to have it already available for FH.

Yes, we definitely DO need that stuff.

Second, you definitely DON’T need to include the “Original Magic System Design Sheet†from 4th ed. pp. 76-77. It was nothing more than a list of game elements with checkboxes next to them. These were the most useless pages I’ve seen since the “Record Sheets†from Champions III.

Dude! FREd is nothing more than two pieces of cardboard with a bunch of words inside.

I happened to get a lot of use out of this. It makes it easy to say "Here's what you can and can't use to build spells." Make up a master, photocopy it a few times, hand it out to your players, and you're saving yourself a lot of time explaining everything at the beginning, or answering the same question from three players who were too busy writing down their spells to hear you the first two times you explained it.

I would say cut it if you need the room, and if nothing else make it available as a PDF download.

Transform Target into "Me" (whether "Me" is evil necromancer, Agent Smith, etc.). Whether it's Mind, Body, or both depends on how it works. Agent Smiht transforms someone's Mind and Body, while the necromancer probably just transforms Mind. The reversion condition is being killed or Transforming someone else.

Season to taste.

The thing about using Dispel against disease earlier and poison here is that you're building them as Gradual Effect. With Gradual Effect, the Power is in effect until the Gradual Effect duration is over, at which time the Power ends. With Dispel, you're shutting down the Power before its Gradual Effect is complete, preventing it from doing any further damage.

So you couldn't use Dispel to bring back Characteristics that have been lost through Drain, damage, or any other reason except Suppress, but you can use it to shut down the Powers that are continuing to cause them.

And there's no restriction on what kind of Powers you can Dispel. You could Dispel an incoming Energy Blast or RKA if you had a held action.

Why not just Dispel Poison for the antidote?

Has the Dogfighting Modifiers table been updated lately? It looks like it could use modifiers for DEX and SPD. As I recall, vehicles didn't have DEX and SPD when that table first appeared....

(Suggestion: +1 if your vehicle has higher DEX, +1 for each +5 DEX; +1 for each SPD higher.)

Edit: Further suggestion: +2 for No Turn Mode; -2 for every level of Limited Maneuverability.

I don't recall. I thought it sounded like a pretty cool idea myself.

Pick up either the Illuminati card game or a bunch of INWO cards. Deal out a Tarot reading with them and see what happens.

Re: You sure this'll work?

Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

Aside from wondering how a ship can carry 1,500 people and still have only 24 BODY....

Ok, 36. I was picking a number out of the air.

Just what does BODY measure here? The bulk of the material of which the ship is composed? The structural integrity of the vessel? The ingenuity of the FDamage Control teams? The tensile strength of duct tape?

It measures the ship's ability to not be destroyed. It can be any or all of those things.

The shields in Star Trek don't act like DEF. Usually it goes something like this:

*BOOM*

 

Captain: Status!

 

Officer: Shields at 89%.

 

*BOOM*

 

Officer: Shields at 78%.

And so on. No damage seems to get through until the shields are scrubbed away. Therefore....

Give the ship something like 10 DEF; it seems pretty tough on its own, but not overly so. The shields become:

+100 BODY, Not vs. Destruction (-1/2), Not Protected By Base Vehicle DEF (-1/2), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), OIF Vehicular (-1), Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll (-1/2). Active Cost: 100 points, Real Cost: 27 points

10 PD 10 ED Force Field, 0 END Persistent (+1), OIF Vehicular (-1), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll (-1/2). Active Cost: 40 points, Real Cost: 15 points

Healing: 5 BODY, Regeneration, 0 END Persistent (+1), Self Only (-1/2), Extra Time: 1 Turn (-1 1/4), Requires Starship Engineering Skill Roll (-1/2), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), Only Affects Shields (-1/2). Active Cost: 100, Real Cost: 25

All hand weapons in the Star Trek setting have Not Vs. Starship Shields (-1/4 at most). Note that they could potentially cut through the ship's skin if their DCs are high enough.

It's one of those common sense, fits the setting things that damage to the shield's BODY doesn't subtract from the ship's base BODY score when the shields go down.

The BODY is Not vs. Destruction in the sense that the Enterprise has, for the sake of argument, 24 BODY. Giving it +100 BODY would ordinarily mean that the ship would be totally destroyed at -124 BODY. Instead, it's totally destroyed at -24 BODY.

The Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll Limitation reflects the times when the starship's weapons are reconfigured to the opposing shield's harmonic frequency or whatever so that it can shoot right through them. If you don't like using Find Weakness for this, change it to Not vs. Weapons Configured to Shield's Harmonic Frequency (-1/2).

The Regeneration reflects the ship's engineers working on the shields.

You can season these writeups to taste.

Comments?

If I were you I would ask the GM if you can alter your Powers somewhat; it sounds like you've built your Powers as Aids and Heals with Variable SFX and Variable Advantage. You might look at something like a Variable Power Pool, Only Herbalism Abilities (-1/2), season to taste. That way you could build lots of Powers that are Usable By Others.

Your dilemma 1 sounds like Life Support or Power Defense, Usable By Others. Your second sounds more like a Dispel Disease; most diseases are built as Drains with Gradual Effect. Or perhaps a Life Support vs. Disease, Usable By Others; it might stop any more damage from occurring but wouldn't heal damage that had already happened.

Nearly all of the Disadvantages are situational in some respect. What you're not doing is linking them in the sense that that term is used in the Hero System, but setting them up so that situationality is a part of how the Disadvantage works. The Accidental Change/Danger Sense combo is one example.

Bob Greenwade wrote:

This is assuming that one is using the optional rules in DH#7. The only rules called upon were those in TUV (well, and FREd), from which those rules were cut. Thus, Life Support on a Vehicle affects the occupants, but any restrictions on where a Vehicle can go is either a Power Limitation, Physical Limitation, Susceptibility, or Special Effect.

I've always assumed that a Vehicle was like any other character in that it requires a base atmosphere type, "food" (fuel), "sleep" (time to cool down), and so on; Bob, I think you mention something like that somewhere in TUV (I just went back and looked but couldn't find the exact place). I would think that, for example, if you wanted a vehicle that could operate in air and space, or a vehicle that needed refueling only once a year or not at all, you'd buy various forms of Life Support for it. But then you need to differentiate between Life Support: Does Not Eat (i.e. requires no fuel) for the vehicle and Does Not Eat (i.e. a galley) for the crew. Or, for a ship that can't operate in an atmosphere, you can define its base "atmosphere" as vacuum; Life Support: Self Contained Breathing would then only apply to the crew.

I think I'm not expressing myself very well today; I hope you get the idea.

An old house rule that was brought up on I think both of the previous incarnations of the boards was that the pool is the amount of Real Points you can have; your Control Cost is half the maximum Active Points of any one Power in the pool. So you could pay, say, 40 points for the pool but 50 for your Control Cost, allowing up to 40 Real Points worth of Powers of up to 100 Active Points each in the pool.

Figure that to get an optimum reentry angle, the pilot has to make a Piloting roll with whatever penalties the GM sees fit. If the roll is critically failed, the ship breaks up right then and there, no need to go any further. If the roll is just failed, roll 1d6 to determine (1-3) whether the angle is too steep (the ship takes more damage) or (4-6) too shallow (the ship skips off the atmosphere). If the angle is too steep, the ship takes +1 BODY per Segment for every point the roll was missed by. The pilot can attempt another roll each Phase (perhaps with a penalty for each failed roll), but that opens up the possibility he will crit fail or at least fail worse.

Some ships have lots of bonuses to the pilot's roll.

Why not just try to figure out what his Desolidification doesn't protect against, then load up on that?

Ewwwwww. I'd be very careful when putting a debit card number online. That's your checking account, and if someone gets ahold of it they can clean you out -- and debit cards don't usually have the same protections that credit cards do.

</threadjack>

The "Modern and Realistic" thread got me to thinking. Toadmaster, a ways back on that thread, wrote:

Personnally I find HERO works very well for these games. Its not just these boards, i've found many gamers have a snobbery against these types of games as unworthy of being RPG's and many on these boards will argue that HERO is terrible for them, don't believe it.

I've never met a genre Hero didn't like. Some of what I've played in Hero:

• Four color superheroes
   
  
• Somewhat deadlier superheroes
   
  
• Wild Cards
   
  
• Teen superheroes
   
  
• Many Fantasy Hero games
   
  
• Fantasy Hero game based on FGU's Bushido
   
  
• Fantasy Hero game based on Robert Asprin's Myth series with a distinct Star Wars flavor
   
  
• Several different translations of Battletech to Hero
   
  
• Generic giant robots (Robot Warriors)
   
  
• Old West
   
  
• Paranoid/gonzo conspiracy a la Illuminati
   
  
• Modern military action adventure
   
  
• Translation of WW's Vampire (that itself started as a modern day with magic game a la GURPS Technomancer)
   
  
• Space opera
   
  
• Pro wrestling
   
  
• Something odd we called "Death Wish", essentially 10 point characters, no powers or disads, dropped on a map and forced to fight to the last man.
   
  
• Weird dimension hopping uhhh...weirdness
   
  
• Ninja Hero (I was one of the Hiro Brothers)
   
  
• I missed out on the Ghostbusters game, but wanted to do one myself.
  

What have you used Hero for, as player or GM? In your opinion, did it "work" for that particular campaign, genre, or setting? Why or why not?

If you're letting Energy Blast douse a fire, I'd say make the whole spell an Energy Blast, Variable SFX and not Stun Only; that way you could use it either to light a fire or douse one.

If you google for

"star wars" "hero system"

with quotes exactly like that, you should be able to find some resources.

Right on the ninjas thing. In our Bushido FH game, I wanted to play a ninja. I had rolled pretty crappy on my social standing (we rolled d% and looked on the social standing table for our FH game); I think I actually rolled an Eta, which is the untouchable caste. Actually fairly close to reality according to the GM, who was an aficionado of Japanese history. He didn't let me play it as a ninja from all of the ninja movies; he let me take a ninja package deal, but my clan had assigned me to protect this shugenja and my cover was as a budoka.

Now that I think about it, you'll probably want to use FH as the basis with lots of goodies from NH for flavor. And I think our game took place during the 1500s; this seems like as good a description as any: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2123.html

Originally posted by mattingly

Can I have a (normally 0 END) power cost 1/2 END, for a -1/4 Limitation?

 

Example: Mental Defense, 20 points; Costs 1/2 END (-1/4). Total cost: 16 points.

I don't see why not. Limited Power, and all that.

I don't have the current Ninja Hero, but I did play in a Fantasy Hero game based on Bushido back in the 80's. I think that Bushido is what's referred to as Sengoku-style.

Let the GM know of your concerns. It could be he's got lots of opportunities for characters with lots o' noncombat skills to shine. OTOH, if the players are all making minmaxed combat monsters, maybe that's the kind of character they want to play and the game they want to play in; in that case, go with it, man!

Originally posted by tiger

If your gonna use Extra Dim Movement you also have to add use as an attack.

Why? You're traveling to the "fast" or "go" dimension.

Extradimensional Movement: to the "go time" dimension (where this dimension is stopped). If you don't like that dimension, make it to the "ultrafast" dimension, where the time flow ratio from there to here is a billion to one. One of the properties of that dimension is that it reflects everything that is in the real world. You can then buy your STR Transdimensional to affect things in the real world.